“God in Annie Dillard’s ‘Coils of Absence’: Suffering and the Hope of Silence” Lori Kanitz, PhD, Assistant Director of the Institute for Faith and Learning, Baylor University

The problem of evil and suffering has been central to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard’s thinking and writing for the whole of her career. Her earliest book begins with an infamous image of a frog being necrotized instantly by a predator’s poison. Her last work of non-fiction, For the Time Being, begins with a frank, unsentimental description of children identified as “bird-headed dwarves” in Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation, a book about which she says, “in conscience, I cannot recommend your prolonged attention.”

Dillard’s metaphysical questions about evil and suffering are held within an unresolved tension signified by recurring motifs of gaps and absences, theodicean spaces created by the logical and concomitant grammatical ellipses created by two apparently contradictory truths: life’s exalted beauty and its often inexplicable suffering. However, for Dillard, suffering is not an anomaly but the condition necessary to life at all--the silent space threading through the whole of the cosmos that permits it freedom. Drawing on imagery from Jewish and Christian theology, Dillard conceives of the cosmos as evolving within the space God concedes as he kenotically elects to limit his omni-attributes.

Yet the “chill humors . . .weighting each cell with an icy dab of non-being” are not merely theodicean spaces God surrenders to the vicissitudes of his creation but potentially fecund, plurivocal silences from which meaning may emerge. Because Dillard is an artist, she constructs “not an explanation but a picture,” a theodicy in stammering prose of a crucified God who, by allowing evil to pierce his own side, holds within himself all silences and voids created by suffering. Thus, the manifold absences suffering creates are potentially beneficent gaps, for in the “coils of absence we meet him.” Indeed, suffering is compassed by the bruised and broken body of God himself.​This paper will seek to explore these images as mimetic ways of thinking theologically about suffering and medicine. Metaphorical meaning, including the macro-metaphor of art, provides an alternate way of knowing that can be a handmaid to healing. Because the language and methodology of medicine has worked spectacularly well, its analytical ways of knowing are often exported wholesale into areas they are ill equipped to explain. Literature might just offer another cognitive tool to explore life’s toughest existential questions. For, as Dillard explains in Living By Fiction, “As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible--or at least visible, at least discussible--those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains which science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little.”